For those interested in a *non* revisionist history of the Civil War, Shelby Foote's three volume The Civil War: A Narrative is hard to beat. "Scholars" today poo poo him, which is strong evidence that he knows what he's talking about.
This is precisely correct, and needs to be more widely understood. Not just that some stand in opposition to you or your position. But their view i irrational, it is hatred towards you, the hated.
They will kill us all if they can get away with it. We saw this spirit during Covid. No vax meant no job, no life, sent to a camp. It was that easy. Now imagine what they think of meat-eating, vax-dodging white terrorists who refuse to help a mere 100 million foreigners who wish to emigrate for a better life. Hanging is too good for us types.
Liberalism was born of the same totalist Enlightenment spirit as Communism and Fascism, and just as militantly expansionist and intolerant of divergent ideologies.
I see no option except to strike back eventually. How many refugees can we take? How far do we let them destroy the schools, the economy or our utilities? Do we wait until every car has a killswitch and we all live in zones?
Voting cannot easily work when thousands of NGOs and a wealthy elite control so much.
Seems like they pushing for it; which means they are trying to draw out a reaction.
Prepare; let’s play the long game. I smell desperation all over these fools.
We need to build foundations now. They are difficult for the enemy to recognize and therefore act against. And we can erect easily upon them once this madness recedes.
Trump may change that. So perhaps voting is not dead yet. Plus as we can see the plans of our overlords are poor. Pathetically so. Like bad science fiction. We are supposed to keep a straight face when we hear our kids will be microchipped and fed cricket burgers.
This situation is indeed dangerous and I’ve been thinking about the implications of the events in Texas in light of these irreconcilable differences. Consider this: what if a miracle occurs, Trump overcomes the margin of fraud, and Our Guys take the reins in 2025? What do we expect to happen at that point? If Greg Abbott can tell the Supreme Court and the White House to piss off about razor wire and immigration enforcement, are we thinking that our enemies (who control a significant number of states) aren’t going to follow suit when Trump tries to enact policy?
What Texas is doing is morally correct and I wholeheartedly support it, but I’m also not naïve about the precedent that holding the line down there sets. Weakening the authority of the White House and Supreme Court means that we potentially inherit that weakness when the roles are reversed. If legalistic solutions to these differences aren’t viable, that leaves a much smaller set of tools to use to resolve disputes. One side of this divide is already bloodthirsty and fanatical, so it behooves us to expect significant escalation.
Sanctuary cities are already the left-liberal equivalent of what Texas is doing. If a jurisdiction can ignore federal law in favor of invasion, it can be ignored to prevent it.
That ship has already sailed, and it was the Left that did it. You can refuse to fight dirty because of your high-minded principles, and the other side will continue bending and breaking the rules to their advantage until you're in a communist gulag -- or so terrified of being sent to one that you chant their slogans and keep your head down lest anyone suspect you of wrongthink.
Listen to the way they talk about you and take them at their word -- and I'm not talking about some fringe radical, but rather mainstream Democrats like the President of the USA. Look at the lawfare they've waged against their political opponents, with the Cheka d/b/a FBI investigating parents who complain about transgenderism in school board meetings and Catholics praying the rosary outside abortion clinics, not to mention the unprecedented criminal prosecutions of a former President and the current candidate for the Presidency, while Biden's own criminal corruption is out in the open. So tell me again what they *might* do in the future if we don't stick to all the old norms that they've been openly flouting these past several years?
Hard agree. Until we literally take them at their word we get lost in some high minded fantasy about the rules everyone ought to be following.
Ilhan Omar recently waxed lyrical about her love of Somalia, how useful it was for one of them (her words) to be in a position of authority in the USA. One of them. She thinks of herself as Somalian. If you say she is Somalian you'll end up in jail.
They have the right idea. If you agree to a polite boxing match and they bring a knife you don't argue about the Queensbury Rules. You bring an assault rifle. They broke the rule so you must escalate to the point you destroy their ability to function.
Needless to say mainstream conservatives do none of this.
A great essay that points in the direction of an overall reinterpretation of the history of American politics as fundamentally a religious conflict in disguise. There is a small but significant scholarly literature leaning in this direction, particularly in the area of foreign relations. The work of Walter McDougall, such as Promised Land, Crusader State, is a case in point. How exactly does Fleming’s work contribute to this?
For what it’s worth, any reconstruction of American life and politics on a non-progressive basis requires a new “narrative” of the nation’s history.
Fleming is not specifically a Civil War historian; most of his work has to do with the Revolution. But he is cutting edge in terms of his willingness to look at unwelcome facts in interpreting the past- 3/4 of plantation overseers were black, for example. His work is neither Lost Cause hagiography nor leftist anti white hate, but rather a careful consideration of evidence even where it goes beyond what is politically acceptable.
I've met few people quite as weird as Pro-Union types on the Internet who still talk about the Civil War as if it's still happening and regularly post about "Rebels" needing to be exterminated. Mostly because the ones I've encountered usually A) don't live in a state that was even in the Union (exception: Ohio), and B) they almost always come from families who are new to the country and moved here long after not just the war, but Reconstruction ended. At some point I vowed not to take anyone's opinion on the American Civil War seriously who can't actually trace their family lineage back to when it happened, and I find the takes seem to balance out after that point on both sides.
But, yes - these people, laughable as they can be sometimes, are unhinged to the point of being dangerous in the wrong situation. Anyone who gets so worked up over an event that's over 250 years old and sees "Johnny Reb" in every Southerner has to be unhinged and I have no doubt that, if encouraged and enabled, they'd burn Atlanta to the ground again. I'd say that they'd be really hurting their cause since Atlanta is a majority black city and it would basically be destroying one of the few centers of black-owned wealth in America, but, for a guy who they apparently believe was out to liberate slaves... Sherman didn't have the best track record when it came to how he treated all the people he "liberated". To put it in your words - he really liberated the crap out of them.
The Civil War was fought between 1861-1865, not quite 250 years ago. That’s not a quibble; there were veterans of that conflict still alive when my dad was born. My wife’s grandfather grew up hearing about the James Gang tearing up the area of rural Missouri where he lived. Especially here in the South it lingers on in our memories and culture in a way hard for outsiders to understand. But what is hard to understand are people from India and Somalia with some passionate feelings about it. And as I noted, the Twitter-libs who post fantasies about Union soldiers sacking Southern cities would despise those men if they ever met them, and be despised in return. The liberal is animated by hatred of the past, never reverence for his society.
What's wild is that just a couple generations ago, the only people who cared about the Civil War were "South will rise again" type Southerners and history nerds. Now, it's the North that cannot let it go and wants to have round two so they can make the South pay for its purported sins. It really is crazy.
People who have white skin who want to re-enact freeing the slaves as a way to assuage the guilt they feel for being white; a way to burn off some of that undeserved privilege they are sure they possess and that is killing them; an avenue of escape.
Very interesting! But have you read historian Tom Holland on the abolition of slavery? That it was a product of Christianity, and would not have happened without the slave trade getting worse? That industrialization, with all its horrors, broke the minds of people into a moral frenzy to abolish it entirely?
Mass hysteria has been a thing probably ever since ten or more folks gathered together. Barking nuns, dancing beggars, flagellating friars, crazy is contagious.
Contact, autoimmunity, induced immunity, incubation periods all are factors. In the past such both aided and delimited the spread of hysteria.
Today; internet, TV, you're only a phone call or text away from almost everybody in the world, it's hard to stay sane when surrounded by barkers, flagellators etc. Hence this age of mass psychosis with the crazies running the asylum.
It's easy to identify, to see at least one why things are as they are.
But some of us are indeed immune. None of the Covid propaganda made a dent in me, and I know others who are like me. Same for all this other madness. None of it gets in. I am not alone. In fact I would say it is a modest number who are affected, definitely less than a third of the population.
I just think many of them are in positions of authority, working in media for example. So it gets amplified.
I think that there is a subset of the population, I would guess about 40% of the whole, who unreservedly believe everything the system tells them, even when it contradicts the previous propaganda. Their identity and self esteem are bound up with allegiance to the system and they can’t accept its fallibility. Another 40% don’t really believe the nonsense but go along with it out of fear or convenience. They peel away from it at the first opportunity. About 20% refuse largely or altogether to buy the nonsense at the outset.
I agree with the groups, but I suspect the believers are more like 20-30 percent. I too reckon the no's are about 20 percent. So 40-50 percent are conformists to varying degrees.
These numbers roughly tally with observations made about the hard, authoritarian cultures through the 20th century, Nazi Germany, Pol Pot's Cambodia etc. And they have been discussed by Arendt too, and most recently by Mattias Desmet writing about Covid. No matter how crazy the regime, about 20 percent just reject it completely.
The key metric is the people who conform. They don't believe it either. So there is hope there.
Why do you imply it is crazy to think that Reconstruction didn't go far enough? A lot of people at the time thought that, among them Radical Republicans and one former Confederate general named Longstreet.
The truth is that the Northern industrialists didn't give a damn about the freed slaves in the South; they wanted stability so they could grow their industries and did not want to pay taxes to actually enforce the Constitution in the former Confederate states. That's why they cut the deal with Southern Democrats in 1877--accept HIs Fraudulency Rutherford Hayes as Prez and we'll pull Federal troops out of the South.
Just a historical quibble. I'm not defending DEI by any means. I work for a county government and have it inflicted upon me once a year. Until I open my mouth and the grifters thank me for my participation and encourage me to leave early, anyway.
I think it was pretty crazy to think that aggressive social engineering would work to undo fundamental aspects of Southern culture given the hostilities remaining from the war. Reconstruction probably did more harm than good in the short term, while industry and mass media accomplished more of the Radical Republicans long-term goals than military rule ever did.
but what's the cure? since the disease of leftism is at bottom an excess of short-term thinking, then there must be two problems: (1) how to encourage, long-term thinking and (2) how to get people to want to listen to long-term thinking. I think a lot of work has been focused on 1, but not nearly enough on 2.
The insanity exists because there is no check on it. There are no consequences for failure. Those will be coming as the world and domestic orders adjust to a new reality.
Of course, but some active measures are appropriate in the meantime.
I think I've discovered the cure, (and by all means criticize it sharply) btw, our "racist": "silly-billy" . Yes, it seems stupid but any attempt to defend oneself against it seems even sillier and the term illustrates, almost without fail, the utter silliness of our enemies which is their main quality. Yes it may make its users seem unserious, but the term, used in conjunction with feudalist politics, will take on import and gravity. And it is the left's extraordinary silliness which is the problem of modernity; people this idiotic should not be leaders, and cannot lead (we shouldn't call them "idiots" tho since it's too general; they could easily call anyone of us idiots but "silly"? it only sticks to them). Silly-billy also denotes bad-faith, for a silly-billy is too silly to argue objectively. There are other good terms to call them as well, but these are largely illegal or de facto illegal, probably because they're so effective, yet "silly-billy" is unlikely to be outlawed either officially or not. One should stick to "silly-billy" and "corporatist" -another good term.
I'd like to emphasize that "silly-billy" connotes both dysfunction, and volition, so that the "silly-billy" is both dysfunctionally silly, and fully responsible for being so i.e. the burden of proof is always on the silly-billy, and the presumption of legitimacy is always on his accuser. The silly-billy is also worse than a murderer, because he wouldn't even know if he was one and nothing prevents him from being one, since he has no judgement. "Silly-billy" also emphasizes the low social value of the accused much more than the accuser; its a term of derision, a pejorative used by parents for their kids.
*self-critique: what if they call us "negative-nellies" (lol) in reply? That's when one has to go into logic-mode and say "well, we're negative b/c ur so silly due to x,y,z, details" and so now the sillies have to play by the rules of logic and details, that is, upon what is for them very alien and hostile terrain; those with a silly ideology will always look sillier trying to explain it. Either way, as absurd as it may seem, the one who wields "silly-billy" is bound to win and does more damage than receives.
L'image d'Abott laissant echappe un grand cri avant d'aller en combat, est si amusant et masculin que je doit remercier ce journaliste (et vous) pour elle! Hahahaha, j'ai bien adorer cette poste, t'as bien fait comme toujours Librarian, tes dissertations sont vraiment incroyables!
I’m a Yankee by birth (rust belt child) with grandparents who immigrated from Italy and Germany. Spent the last 19 years in Florida and have traveled extensively through the Deep South RVing. It’s an incredible education because growing up (in my 40s) we learned a very structured and cookie cutter version of history in public school. We were poor and the schools had little funding. But overall the message was South Bad, North good, slavery was the reason and Lincoln’s awesome.
Over the last few years we’ve made it a point to stop as local museums in Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee. One of my favorite spots is Mobile Alabama and their historical museums. Also the Mississippi agricultural museum in Jackson. You really learn so much more about the south, the civil war from a multi faceted, complex political, socioeconomic and cultural viewpoint and most important how schools are indoctrination focused versus truly educating kids on real history.
I actually like the south except for the lack of bluntness. Lol. I still prefer my north eastern and rust belt realness when it comes to dealing with conflict and businesses in my profession but overall doing am glad I’ve had my eyes open.
For those interested in a *non* revisionist history of the Civil War, Shelby Foote's three volume The Civil War: A Narrative is hard to beat. "Scholars" today poo poo him, which is strong evidence that he knows what he's talking about.
Agreed - Shelby Foote’s books are excellent but unfortunately disregarded by too many historians.
Foote’s work is a classic.
MAGA as a pejorative is uniting in the minds of elites and progressives the unwashed white deplorables of the north and south.
They will take everything from us, including our lives, if we let them.
Fortunately, while they are powerful, their rule is brittle and riddled with insanity.
In the extreme. I hear the new plan is to tear down all hydroelectric in the NW.
This is precisely correct, and needs to be more widely understood. Not just that some stand in opposition to you or your position. But their view i irrational, it is hatred towards you, the hated.
They will kill us all if they can get away with it. We saw this spirit during Covid. No vax meant no job, no life, sent to a camp. It was that easy. Now imagine what they think of meat-eating, vax-dodging white terrorists who refuse to help a mere 100 million foreigners who wish to emigrate for a better life. Hanging is too good for us types.
There are few as bloodthirsty as an American liberal.
Liberalism was born of the same totalist Enlightenment spirit as Communism and Fascism, and just as militantly expansionist and intolerant of divergent ideologies.
It is bred of the same utopianism. They are commited to making you happy, if they have to kill you to do it.
Well written. At this point we truly hate each other. This is a dangerous situation. I agree they continually prod us hoping we will strike back.
I see no option except to strike back eventually. How many refugees can we take? How far do we let them destroy the schools, the economy or our utilities? Do we wait until every car has a killswitch and we all live in zones?
Voting cannot easily work when thousands of NGOs and a wealthy elite control so much.
Seems like they pushing for it; which means they are trying to draw out a reaction.
Prepare; let’s play the long game. I smell desperation all over these fools.
We need to build foundations now. They are difficult for the enemy to recognize and therefore act against. And we can erect easily upon them once this madness recedes.
Their greatest weakness is the existence of reality. Men aren't women, debt isn't actually money, the polar bears are somehow not extinct 😉
I’m worried you are right!!
Trump may change that. So perhaps voting is not dead yet. Plus as we can see the plans of our overlords are poor. Pathetically so. Like bad science fiction. We are supposed to keep a straight face when we hear our kids will be microchipped and fed cricket burgers.
Do as much as you can, as well as you can, for as long as you can. Even voting. When it's over, then rest.
This situation is indeed dangerous and I’ve been thinking about the implications of the events in Texas in light of these irreconcilable differences. Consider this: what if a miracle occurs, Trump overcomes the margin of fraud, and Our Guys take the reins in 2025? What do we expect to happen at that point? If Greg Abbott can tell the Supreme Court and the White House to piss off about razor wire and immigration enforcement, are we thinking that our enemies (who control a significant number of states) aren’t going to follow suit when Trump tries to enact policy?
What Texas is doing is morally correct and I wholeheartedly support it, but I’m also not naïve about the precedent that holding the line down there sets. Weakening the authority of the White House and Supreme Court means that we potentially inherit that weakness when the roles are reversed. If legalistic solutions to these differences aren’t viable, that leaves a much smaller set of tools to use to resolve disputes. One side of this divide is already bloodthirsty and fanatical, so it behooves us to expect significant escalation.
Sanctuary cities are already the left-liberal equivalent of what Texas is doing. If a jurisdiction can ignore federal law in favor of invasion, it can be ignored to prevent it.
That ship has already sailed, and it was the Left that did it. You can refuse to fight dirty because of your high-minded principles, and the other side will continue bending and breaking the rules to their advantage until you're in a communist gulag -- or so terrified of being sent to one that you chant their slogans and keep your head down lest anyone suspect you of wrongthink.
Listen to the way they talk about you and take them at their word -- and I'm not talking about some fringe radical, but rather mainstream Democrats like the President of the USA. Look at the lawfare they've waged against their political opponents, with the Cheka d/b/a FBI investigating parents who complain about transgenderism in school board meetings and Catholics praying the rosary outside abortion clinics, not to mention the unprecedented criminal prosecutions of a former President and the current candidate for the Presidency, while Biden's own criminal corruption is out in the open. So tell me again what they *might* do in the future if we don't stick to all the old norms that they've been openly flouting these past several years?
Hard agree. Until we literally take them at their word we get lost in some high minded fantasy about the rules everyone ought to be following.
Ilhan Omar recently waxed lyrical about her love of Somalia, how useful it was for one of them (her words) to be in a position of authority in the USA. One of them. She thinks of herself as Somalian. If you say she is Somalian you'll end up in jail.
They have the right idea. If you agree to a polite boxing match and they bring a knife you don't argue about the Queensbury Rules. You bring an assault rifle. They broke the rule so you must escalate to the point you destroy their ability to function.
Needless to say mainstream conservatives do none of this.
My hope is that things evolve peacefully into a better situation. But I’m a realist.
I don't see how that happens. If Biden retreats, it will be tactical only. Evil never quits.
A great essay that points in the direction of an overall reinterpretation of the history of American politics as fundamentally a religious conflict in disguise. There is a small but significant scholarly literature leaning in this direction, particularly in the area of foreign relations. The work of Walter McDougall, such as Promised Land, Crusader State, is a case in point. How exactly does Fleming’s work contribute to this?
For what it’s worth, any reconstruction of American life and politics on a non-progressive basis requires a new “narrative” of the nation’s history.
Fleming is not specifically a Civil War historian; most of his work has to do with the Revolution. But he is cutting edge in terms of his willingness to look at unwelcome facts in interpreting the past- 3/4 of plantation overseers were black, for example. His work is neither Lost Cause hagiography nor leftist anti white hate, but rather a careful consideration of evidence even where it goes beyond what is politically acceptable.
I've met few people quite as weird as Pro-Union types on the Internet who still talk about the Civil War as if it's still happening and regularly post about "Rebels" needing to be exterminated. Mostly because the ones I've encountered usually A) don't live in a state that was even in the Union (exception: Ohio), and B) they almost always come from families who are new to the country and moved here long after not just the war, but Reconstruction ended. At some point I vowed not to take anyone's opinion on the American Civil War seriously who can't actually trace their family lineage back to when it happened, and I find the takes seem to balance out after that point on both sides.
But, yes - these people, laughable as they can be sometimes, are unhinged to the point of being dangerous in the wrong situation. Anyone who gets so worked up over an event that's over 250 years old and sees "Johnny Reb" in every Southerner has to be unhinged and I have no doubt that, if encouraged and enabled, they'd burn Atlanta to the ground again. I'd say that they'd be really hurting their cause since Atlanta is a majority black city and it would basically be destroying one of the few centers of black-owned wealth in America, but, for a guy who they apparently believe was out to liberate slaves... Sherman didn't have the best track record when it came to how he treated all the people he "liberated". To put it in your words - he really liberated the crap out of them.
The Civil War was fought between 1861-1865, not quite 250 years ago. That’s not a quibble; there were veterans of that conflict still alive when my dad was born. My wife’s grandfather grew up hearing about the James Gang tearing up the area of rural Missouri where he lived. Especially here in the South it lingers on in our memories and culture in a way hard for outsiders to understand. But what is hard to understand are people from India and Somalia with some passionate feelings about it. And as I noted, the Twitter-libs who post fantasies about Union soldiers sacking Southern cities would despise those men if they ever met them, and be despised in return. The liberal is animated by hatred of the past, never reverence for his society.
What's wild is that just a couple generations ago, the only people who cared about the Civil War were "South will rise again" type Southerners and history nerds. Now, it's the North that cannot let it go and wants to have round two so they can make the South pay for its purported sins. It really is crazy.
Today’s Yankees have none of the virtues or advantages of their ancestors, and all of their vices and problems.
People who have white skin who want to re-enact freeing the slaves as a way to assuage the guilt they feel for being white; a way to burn off some of that undeserved privilege they are sure they possess and that is killing them; an avenue of escape.
Atlanta's too woke and a major digital nexus. The burning I don't doubt, however.
Very interesting! But have you read historian Tom Holland on the abolition of slavery? That it was a product of Christianity, and would not have happened without the slave trade getting worse? That industrialization, with all its horrors, broke the minds of people into a moral frenzy to abolish it entirely?
I have not read Holland on that, but I am familiar with his work. The thesis makes sense and I’ve seen others advance it. I will check it out.
This age of mass psychosis.
Mass hysteria has been a thing probably ever since ten or more folks gathered together. Barking nuns, dancing beggars, flagellating friars, crazy is contagious.
Contact, autoimmunity, induced immunity, incubation periods all are factors. In the past such both aided and delimited the spread of hysteria.
Today; internet, TV, you're only a phone call or text away from almost everybody in the world, it's hard to stay sane when surrounded by barkers, flagellators etc. Hence this age of mass psychosis with the crazies running the asylum.
It's easy to identify, to see at least one why things are as they are.
Fixing the problem's another story.
But some of us are indeed immune. None of the Covid propaganda made a dent in me, and I know others who are like me. Same for all this other madness. None of it gets in. I am not alone. In fact I would say it is a modest number who are affected, definitely less than a third of the population.
I just think many of them are in positions of authority, working in media for example. So it gets amplified.
I think that there is a subset of the population, I would guess about 40% of the whole, who unreservedly believe everything the system tells them, even when it contradicts the previous propaganda. Their identity and self esteem are bound up with allegiance to the system and they can’t accept its fallibility. Another 40% don’t really believe the nonsense but go along with it out of fear or convenience. They peel away from it at the first opportunity. About 20% refuse largely or altogether to buy the nonsense at the outset.
I agree with the groups, but I suspect the believers are more like 20-30 percent. I too reckon the no's are about 20 percent. So 40-50 percent are conformists to varying degrees.
These numbers roughly tally with observations made about the hard, authoritarian cultures through the 20th century, Nazi Germany, Pol Pot's Cambodia etc. And they have been discussed by Arendt too, and most recently by Mattias Desmet writing about Covid. No matter how crazy the regime, about 20 percent just reject it completely.
The key metric is the people who conform. They don't believe it either. So there is hope there.
Why do you imply it is crazy to think that Reconstruction didn't go far enough? A lot of people at the time thought that, among them Radical Republicans and one former Confederate general named Longstreet.
The truth is that the Northern industrialists didn't give a damn about the freed slaves in the South; they wanted stability so they could grow their industries and did not want to pay taxes to actually enforce the Constitution in the former Confederate states. That's why they cut the deal with Southern Democrats in 1877--accept HIs Fraudulency Rutherford Hayes as Prez and we'll pull Federal troops out of the South.
Just a historical quibble. I'm not defending DEI by any means. I work for a county government and have it inflicted upon me once a year. Until I open my mouth and the grifters thank me for my participation and encourage me to leave early, anyway.
I think it was pretty crazy to think that aggressive social engineering would work to undo fundamental aspects of Southern culture given the hostilities remaining from the war. Reconstruction probably did more harm than good in the short term, while industry and mass media accomplished more of the Radical Republicans long-term goals than military rule ever did.
Yes. Reconstruction is where the bitter hatred emerged. Thanks to the Republicans.
Thanks for a good thoughtful answer that is based on the material realities of the time.
It's as valid an argument against the actual policies implemented by the Grant Administration as any that those same policies didn't go far enough.
The truth is it is speculation either way now.
but what's the cure? since the disease of leftism is at bottom an excess of short-term thinking, then there must be two problems: (1) how to encourage, long-term thinking and (2) how to get people to want to listen to long-term thinking. I think a lot of work has been focused on 1, but not nearly enough on 2.
The insanity exists because there is no check on it. There are no consequences for failure. Those will be coming as the world and domestic orders adjust to a new reality.
Of course, but some active measures are appropriate in the meantime.
I think I've discovered the cure, (and by all means criticize it sharply) btw, our "racist": "silly-billy" . Yes, it seems stupid but any attempt to defend oneself against it seems even sillier and the term illustrates, almost without fail, the utter silliness of our enemies which is their main quality. Yes it may make its users seem unserious, but the term, used in conjunction with feudalist politics, will take on import and gravity. And it is the left's extraordinary silliness which is the problem of modernity; people this idiotic should not be leaders, and cannot lead (we shouldn't call them "idiots" tho since it's too general; they could easily call anyone of us idiots but "silly"? it only sticks to them). Silly-billy also denotes bad-faith, for a silly-billy is too silly to argue objectively. There are other good terms to call them as well, but these are largely illegal or de facto illegal, probably because they're so effective, yet "silly-billy" is unlikely to be outlawed either officially or not. One should stick to "silly-billy" and "corporatist" -another good term.
I'd like to emphasize that "silly-billy" connotes both dysfunction, and volition, so that the "silly-billy" is both dysfunctionally silly, and fully responsible for being so i.e. the burden of proof is always on the silly-billy, and the presumption of legitimacy is always on his accuser. The silly-billy is also worse than a murderer, because he wouldn't even know if he was one and nothing prevents him from being one, since he has no judgement. "Silly-billy" also emphasizes the low social value of the accused much more than the accuser; its a term of derision, a pejorative used by parents for their kids.
*self-critique: what if they call us "negative-nellies" (lol) in reply? That's when one has to go into logic-mode and say "well, we're negative b/c ur so silly due to x,y,z, details" and so now the sillies have to play by the rules of logic and details, that is, upon what is for them very alien and hostile terrain; those with a silly ideology will always look sillier trying to explain it. Either way, as absurd as it may seem, the one who wields "silly-billy" is bound to win and does more damage than receives.
L'image d'Abott laissant echappe un grand cri avant d'aller en combat, est si amusant et masculin que je doit remercier ce journaliste (et vous) pour elle! Hahahaha, j'ai bien adorer cette poste, t'as bien fait comme toujours Librarian, tes dissertations sont vraiment incroyables!
Abbott est comme de Braveheart, <<ils peuvent prendre nôtre vies, mais ils ne prendront jamais nos barbelés!>>
Hahahhahaha bien dit mon ami, cela semble vraiment être le cas, et j'imagine que pleins de Texans & Texanes aimeront cette blague là!
Getting that Fleming book. Thanks!
Check out his other stuff as well; he’s prolific and always interesting.
Great piece. I have similar thoughts on the theocratic fundaments of the civil war. https://lorendean.substack.com/p/learn-from-history-deus-vult
Liked and subbed.
I’m a Yankee by birth (rust belt child) with grandparents who immigrated from Italy and Germany. Spent the last 19 years in Florida and have traveled extensively through the Deep South RVing. It’s an incredible education because growing up (in my 40s) we learned a very structured and cookie cutter version of history in public school. We were poor and the schools had little funding. But overall the message was South Bad, North good, slavery was the reason and Lincoln’s awesome.
Over the last few years we’ve made it a point to stop as local museums in Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee. One of my favorite spots is Mobile Alabama and their historical museums. Also the Mississippi agricultural museum in Jackson. You really learn so much more about the south, the civil war from a multi faceted, complex political, socioeconomic and cultural viewpoint and most important how schools are indoctrination focused versus truly educating kids on real history.
I actually like the south except for the lack of bluntness. Lol. I still prefer my north eastern and rust belt realness when it comes to dealing with conflict and businesses in my profession but overall doing am glad I’ve had my eyes open.
ty
“This investigation probably cost the DoD $21 million dollars, and it’s not what I mean. Metaphors, people…”
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